Eye Fixation Patterns Support Improved Guidance As The Source Of Reduced Search Times In Contextual Cueing
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1
The University of Queensland, Queensland Brain Institute, Australia
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2
The University of Queensland, Psychology, Australia
In visual search, participants report the identity of a target faster for search displays that are intermittently repeated than for those that are novel (Chun & Jiang, 1998). This ‘contextual cueing’ benefit has been attributed to attentional guidance improvements, arguing that in repeated displays attention implicitly encodes the location of the target in relation to a constant distractor context. The guidance account has been challenged by evidence that contextual cueing still occurs when attentional guidance is optimal (Kunar, Flusberg, Horowitz, & Wolfe, 2007), more consistent with a facilitation of response selection. To further examine the mechanisms underlying contextual cueing we tracked participants’ eye movements while they performed a spatially cued contextual cueing task (Schankin & Schubö, 2010). Repeated and novel search displays were preceded by a spatial cue at either the target location (valid trials) or at the location of a distractor item (invalid trials). Results demonstrated that participants were faster to report the target in repeated than in novel displays, but only when these displays were preceded by an invalid cue. No contextual cueing benefit was observed on valid cue trials, when target localization was already optimal. Eye tracking analyses showed that these reaction time results were due primarily to fewer fixations required for invalidly cued repeated compared to novel displays. No differences were found between repeated and novel displays in any other eye tracking measures (time from target fixation to response, dwell, initial eye movement latency). Taken together with the absence of an effect of display repetition on validly cued trials our results support the role of attentional guidance in contextual cueing.
Keywords:
response selection,
implicit learning,
eye tracking,
contextual cueing,
Attentional guidance
Conference:
XII International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON-XII), Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, 27 Jul - 31 Jul, 2014.
Presentation Type:
Poster
Topic:
Memory and Learning
Citation:
Harris
A and
Remington
R
(2015). Eye Fixation Patterns Support Improved Guidance As The Source Of Reduced Search Times In Contextual Cueing.
Conference Abstract:
XII International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON-XII).
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2015.217.00136
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Received:
19 Feb 2015;
Published Online:
24 Apr 2015.
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Correspondence:
Mr. Anthony Harris, The University of Queensland, Queensland Brain Institute, Brisbane, Australia, anthony.harris1@uqconnect.edu.au